Citing a long wait for trial, lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee have asked a judge to dismiss charges against him in the deadly 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa.

The lawyers for Ahmed Ghailani made the arguments in papers filed in US District Court in Manhattan and released yesterday.

They said their client’s case raised the question of whether national security can trump an indicted defendant’s constitutional right to a speedy trial.

Authorities allege that Ghailani was a bomb-maker, document forger and aide to Osama bin Laden who helped lay the groundwork for the attacks in August 1998 at embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The massacres killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

Ghailani, who was brought to the United States in June to face trial, is the first Guantanamo detainee to be brought before a US federal court rather than a military tribunal. The Tanzanian, captured in Pakistan in 2004, had been held at the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006.

Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, would be moved along with four other detainees from Guantanamo to New York to face a civilian federal trial.

The lawyers wrote that the United States did not inform him of his rights until 4½ years after his capture.